I am currently a Contributing Editor at Wired Magazine in the UK, having written for Wired UK since its launch in 2009, and speak regularly on the impact of developing technologies on consumer behaviors at Wired Consulting events and elsewhere.
In my copious free time, I write for Wired, GQ and elsewhere on the emerging digital culture, from gaming giants to adventurous startups, and provide creative insight for technology companies. In previous lives, I managed corporate communications for a large software company, and was a senior creative at a Hoxton agency. But then again, who wasn't?
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DoritosGate's Distractions: Watch The Wire, Not The Angel

As Dorito(s)Gate rolls on, I’ve been reminded more and more of a line from a song by The Auteurs – watch the angel, not the wire.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s a metaphor I’ve used before, to describe accepting one’s own misdirection in the pursuit of entertainment. It’s what the magician relies on when he ask you to confirm that he has nothing up his sleeve. It’s the trick within the trick: keeping the audience’s eyes on the assistant, not the collapsing box or the palmed coin. When the magician shakes his sleeve at you, you know that this is misdirection – that while you check the sleeve the other hand will be doing something out of your sight.

And yet you check the sleeve anyway. Because it’s part of the trick.

Just as people go to comedy clubs wanting to laugh, they go to magic shows wanting to be fooled – not a lot, but a little. You watch the angel, not the wire, because it’s more fun to look at a spotlit woman in a sparkly leotard flying through the air than a thin wire extending from her back to the ceiling. You know it’s a trick, but the trick of the trick is to be tricked by it a little.

No angels

If I were putting the “PR” in “prestidigitator” right now, I would be breathing a sigh of relief that the attention of the audience has largely remained firmly fixed on the flashy swishes of the cane – the often emotional exchanges between journalists, publications and those who read them. The curtain has not been pulled back. The wire remains invisible.

For example, the picture which started this all off has been repeated and reposted even as the subject matter has strayed further and further from it. The image was one of corporate patronage – of a journalist caught between corporate sponsors, wrapped in a net of snack foods and AAA marketing. To one side, the cross-marketed, tied-in entertainment juggernaut Halo 4 – a AAA game, which is to say one too big to fail. To the other, a table of Doritos and Mountain Dew. For the writer Rob Florence, this represented the failure of the games media to challenge the corporatization of their subject, and indeed their collusion in it.

And yet.

And yet the questions it raises – about the relationship between games media and advertisers, and the impact of endorsement deals on games (and whether this connection is closer than between other media and advertisers, whether it is destructive and what can be done about that) have been largely abandoned or ignored. Calling this brouhaha “Doritogate” is almost a cargo cult prayer at this point – a call to an absent subject. As the investigation settled on legal chicanery and games of Whose Libel Is It Anyway, it seems those with the serious money and power had dodged a bullet. Or caught it in their teeth, to extend the metaphor, before spitting it daintily aside.

Whose Defiance is it, anyway?

There were many consequences of Eurogamer removing passages from Rob Florence’s last Lost Humanity article, apparently under threat of legal action. One minor and unintentional consequence was that it removed the only reference in the piece to the company which had actually set up the competition – tweet the promotional hashtag, maybe win a PS3 – at the Games Media Awards. This company produced the game which the tweets namechecked, and paid for the alcohol the guests were drinking at the pre-awards reception. But, curiously, it has barely appeared in the subsequent discussion. And, although the removal of this text Streisanded the heck out of one part of this situation, other parts seem to have been increasingly forgotten.

It’s possible that we have higher standards for journalists than for publishers – that we expect publishers to set up these situations, and expect journalists not to fall into them. The problem is, dead-heading members of a near-limitless and often impecunious enthusiast press one by one is an unwinnable game of whack-a-mole. There is, it seems, an endless supply of young people ready to work for tips and T-shirts, on their own or others’ publishing platforms.

On the other hand, there are actually relatively few games companies with the resources regularly to offer this kind of dilemma. Around ten corporate entities account for a large number of the games being reported on by the games press. A solid ethics statement on their part would be hugely more effective than individually pulling the wings off journalists, no matter how egregious those journalists’ actions may be. It’s great theater, but in the long run it’s unlikely to change the system.

That requires a series of difficult conversations. The first of which is possibly whether consumers of games media actually want rigorously ethical reporting in their media.

Bear with me.

How I Binged Your Mother

When How I Met Your Mother was induced to forgo the generic globe icons covering the Apple logos on its on-screen laptops for an episode and instead have Ted pull out a Windows-branded notebook for one episode, it turned out not to be the death of How I Met Your Mother, at least in ratings terms. The hero of Tron:Evolution favoring a Nokia N8 for his hacking was not generally seen as problematic, merely improbable. Product placement is just a thing that happens in film and TV, and is done more or less well.

HIMYM and Tron are pure entertainment products, but then so, arguably, is a measurable amount of the broad sweep of games writing.

A thin film of civility

Film is actually a interesting example. The press generally gather in one place to meet the stars in a hotel (for print interviews) or a two-camera studio set (for television featurettes). Opportunities to spend time with a star without a hovering studio presence are few. This situation exists and is perpetuated because people want to read about the star, and they want to have the lowering presence of the studio removed from the reports.

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“It’s possible that we have higher standards for journalists than for publishers – that we expect publishers to set up these situations, and expect journalists not to fall into them.”

That’s the thing right there, everyone expect companies to do things (and spend money) to further their own interests. We know that they have a very large “Public Relations” department and we know what they largely do, we also know that they engage in astro-turfing and review fixing (and have even been caught doing it in the past). But it’s kind of their job to try and sell their product and they oftentimes have a higher Marketing budget than for actual game development.

Where it ultimately fails, is the people that are supposed to not fall for these things or get in bed with those companies and should be faithful to their readership doing exactly that instead of exposing them.

Theoretically, if most publications suddenly grew a backbone and wouldn’t be intimidated and kept on a short leash by publisher PR they could remodel the field after their own rules, ultimately publishers WANT to get publicity and get Previews, Interviews and Features about their newest products out there to the hungry masses of consumers, best if it comes from a “trustworthy” source.

But if most publications are following the company line, obeying practices like “review embargoes”, PR demanding to hold back “bad reviews” till considerably after release, reviewing games on the spot at a publisher event, selling glowing Previews to the highest bidder and “Exclusive Reviews” a week or two ahead of everyone else with stipulated target scores etc. they can ultimately pick and choose who they take to do that instead of being desperate to get noticed at all.

It’s very hard to ultimately fault the companies whose job it is to sell products for trying to do so, it is another thing entirely with the companies whose job should be informing the consumer base if these products are good or bad and to impartially report about them.

Funnily enough, I was just looking at the comments to Paul Tassi’s review of Halo 4 (linked above), where he is getting criticised for not giving it a high enough score, with the examples of other gaming sites, who have awarded it 9.8, being cited as _correct_… which is particularly odd, of course, because the people who are commenting have not actually played it yet. Whereas I guess if this was a game which they believed should be getting lower marks, it would be a sign that these sites had been got to by PR…

I wouldn’t know, I don’t see any comments on his article (might be another Flash failure, of which Forbes seems to have a lot) and have absolutely no interest in Halo/have never played it. As long as a site doesn’t appear on Metacritic it is also of lower to no concern to publishers.

I’ve seen pictures around though, and I largely shut down at blinding hyperbole and marketing speak, of which the IGN review seems to be rather full of: http://i.imgur.com/5U1cr.jpg

That’s kind of a classical liberal approach, I think – that individuals and corporations should pursue their self-interest… so, corporations take whatever steps they feel appropriate to maximize profits, and rely on a free press to detect and draw attention to immoral or dangerous acts. Committing the acts raises the risk of discovery and public backlash, but the acts are not to be discouraged in and of themselves, structurally.

Obviously, a free press is a vital part of a well-regulated system, and always is. But this isn’t generally the way systems work in the world – there are forces which pull away from the classical liberal model, in both directions (towards regulation and towards stacking the economic deck). There are laws not only protecting the ability of others to report on wrongdoing, but also identifying and forbidding wrongdoing.

So… if you are convinced that the practices above are going on, and are endemic through the industry, it seems like the publishing industry and its contracted publicists have a part to play in taking those situations off the table.

I guess my perspective on this is as someone who has worked on ethics programs for big industry (outside the games industry). Those ethics programs made it clear that it was unacceptable to solicit or accept extra-contractual inducements, but also that it was unethical to offer them, and unacceptable even to create a situation where it seemed they might be being offered, or could be offered in the future.

How that applies to the games media is an interesting challenge – I’m an outsider in this, although an interested one, but I am sure I am not the only person thinking hard about how this all fits together. Rob Fahey, of Gamesindustry.biz, just wrote a very detailed piece, which I think has a lot of good analysis and insight. Loss of trust from consumers is obviously a problem for the games media, but it’s also a problem for games publishers. And, likewise, it seems odd to give a clean ethical bill of health to publishers if you believe that they are indulging in the behaviors you list above, simply because they are doing so in the pursuit of selling their product…

Well that’s the thing: the audience is deeply flawed, of course, but can’t be changed. The publishers are out to make money, and can’t be changed. The only people who can be held to account, truly, are the journalists and bloggers and critics. And we get criticized, of course, for saying mean things or saying too nice of things etc. You can’t win, but you can try to play fair.

Yea, thats been how IGN has been like since they started reviews really. Every time a huge game was reviewed, even prior to release, you get people saying it should he higher/lower than what was given.

Unfortunately, with forbes increased readership, this types of things will become more often.

Interesting question; I think audiences can change, and have – there are macro shifts affecting all of gaming, and also subdemographics within specific areas of gaming, which change through both natural and artificial means. Sure, if you are making a game that has to sell, say, 10 million copies at $60 a shot to make a meaningful profit, that limits the kind of audience you can build it for, and that has consequences, but it doesn’t mean you can’t encourage particular behaviors either by how you build the game, how you market it or how you manage it. The claim that sexist abuse in Halo 4 multiplayer is going to be punished by lifetime bans, for example, is interesting, although I’ll believe it when I see it. And at the other end, I don’t really see _why_ publishers can’t be changed. In fact, a drum that is beaten pretty often is that action by journalists and audiences has power to change publisher behaviors.

So, there’s a pressure from without – from purchasers and media – which leads to things like the Mass Effect 3 Extended Cut (for better or for worse). And there’s also the possibility of self-regulation, or external regulation. What shape that might take is an interesting question, and I don’t think there’s a clear answer to it, just as we’re seeing different ethics policies being outlined at the moment, but it certainly exists as a possibility. There are already external regulations which change what might otherwise be natural publisher behaviors: Zynga’s desire to make money is regulated by US gambling law, for example, and GREE’s is regulated by laws preventing compugacha in Japan. The FCPA prevents a lot of behaviors by businesses which they might otherwise employ…

So, without a deeper shift, I suspect that strict ethics policies from games sites will simply see those PR approaches shifted to the next tier. Which may be what has to happen – an enthusiast press which actively seeks to keep publishers happy in exchange for access, and sees that as its value – it gives its readers up-to-the-minute news and exclusive content, and makes necessary compromises to get it. And then a higher-prestige, lower-audience press, smaller and probably not as remunerative (unless it is part of a mainstream publication or media group which supports it as it might a poetry list) which writes not so much about games, or at least about the latest news on the latest AAA games, but about gaming.

The alternative – root and branch reformation of how PR, publishers and journalism interact – is a much tougher proposition. But, if as D3xt3r says, games media in general should be held accountable for not making a unified stand against this kind of thing, I think it’s worth noting that the publishers could also be held accountable, and could change – and it would be easier for them to change, in fact, than either to change the broad church of “writing about games”, or to persuade the mass audience that their interests are better served by journalists not travelling to previews or chasing exclusive interviews – although all of those can be pursued at once.

See also the DoYouInverts 7/10, where a man explains to his wife that she shouldn’t be upset that he gave her 7/10, and maybe 8. His argument being that she is a solid example of her genre, and people who like her would like her, but she has some unfair level design and there _are_ better women out there, whereas a 10 would have to redefine femininity, which she does not do.

(Heartily agree, by the way, that discussion of games, and indeed everything else, would be massively improved if people stopped using “retard” and “retarded” as a pejorative, but it feels like we are a long way from that happy day…)